


Feeding the Pigeons

by TheLightdancer



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 09:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30120651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: On the anniversary of Morpheus's death, Death goes to the park in New York City to feed pigeons.
Relationships: Foxglove Sandman)/Hazel McNamara
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Feeding the Pigeons

Death of the Endless had lived a very long life, and as far as she knew had one ahead of her at least twice as long as what she'd already lived. She had had good times and bad times and all the times in between. Hers the lot to live life in all its twists and turns, to experience the inexplicable, to be the Endless who humbled herself once a century on all worlds to live as a mortal lived upon them. Here, in this world, there were many layers of things. She'd been here in New York City plenty of times. The incident of 11 September, various attacks by supervillains against the various teams located here, among them the New Teen Titans in their glory days. She'd passed an image of the old Titans Tower with the team in front of it without bothering to look at it, simply taking some bread in a bag, and stretching slightly. 

To those who would have seen her (and she did not anticipate that quite a few did) she was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. Indeed, she seemed more of a girl than a woman, in a timeless teenage appearance that had hair bushier than usual today (as she could never be bothered to take the time or suffer the pain to try to brush it). Today instead of her jeans she wore a longer skirt, past her knees, of the same kind of denim-seeming appearance as her jeans. Her shoes were flats and she had on long socks that were in truth if she had been mortal too warm for the weather in a New York summer. She did not care, not really. Her top exposed part of her midriff, exposing more of it as she stretched and she then put the bag down to pull down the top to its maximum length with a slight half-hearted grumble. 

She strode then to the park, confidently, dismissing a couple of catcalls from men who did not understand why, on the days when she came for them as herself Death gave them such a strange look when they spoke of her as the appearance she had and not the person she was. Were she mortal she would have had more reason to worry, but when she did meet their gaze for a moment something of who she was and what she was blazed out and the men soon found other things to do with their time as her black lips curled upward in a slight smile. 

Into the park she strode, remembering when she'd been there with Sexton back in the day, though she did not go to the fountain where Didi D'Eath had breathed her last. Not from fear of it, because that wasn't a good place for what she was really here for, as she wound her way through Central Park, glorying for a moment in the heat of the Sun on her skin, the sound of the wind through the trees and ruffling the grass. With such splendors were mortals gifted and yet from fear of her and of what she could do, so much else was missed by them. They wanted a world that made sense and she more than most knew that if there was sense it was in the hands of things that were akin to them and yet not them. That did not cloud her mood much more than it usually was, as she arrived at a bench and sat on it more heavily than otherwise. 

In her job she spent time kindly and affable, the friend that all mortals wished to meet, having learned long ago that the old icy brittle armor was weak, that all it took was a single question from a single child to shatter it. Her body twitched slightly and for a moment her hand brushed the deep scar on her chest she concealed by a glamor and then she shook her head and took the bag. 

She remembered a long time ago, and in all iterations save the seven where she'd chosen to spare Dream the fate that otherwise befell him (and in a deep bitterness and shame found that it was Dream who grew and became better where she seemed to sink deeper into the morass she hid so deeply from her kin) going to Dream in London, where he was feeding pigeons in Hyde Park, and talking to him. For a moment she closed her eyes to hear the deep thunder of Morpheus's voice, low and resonant, with an infrasound aspect that each and all who heard it save his kin heard the voice as what they imagined the idea of Dreams would be like. To her and to their kin it was low and rumbling, with a coldness that hid a tiny spark of warmth within. 

Her hands slid into the bag and moved out a full, unsliced loaf and she ripped a part of the bread out, and cast it with a gentle flick of her wrist. 

The pigeons cooed and were soon starting to feed, and Death let herself smile. Such a small thing, the ability to do this. To be around life without taking it. 

The long burdens weighed her down, sometimes, none less so than the need to take her own siblings, her parents, the Presence and the Silver City and Hell and Tartarus....and her children, the few of them that she'd had and kept quiet lest their lives become too marked by the cruel burden of her family and what they were. It was good, to her, to take this time. Not to be Death, there in a billion worlds simultaneously taking life in the small scale and in the greater one. Nor Life bending to give the breath of life to those who needed it most. 

She threw the bread and heard the sound of wings and couldn't resist a small smile at things. 

When she heard the voice of two women, she froze for a moment. 

She remembered them well, the woman who'd given a concert, her very first, which she had listened to and enjoyed deeply. And the other, whom she loved more than she loved most people and yet, as she was neither Desire nor Dream nor even Destruction, she had simply heard her tell her the words that she'd wanted to hear and then returned her her child alive and well. Time had set in with them over a quarter-century. They had been young, then, in their early twenties. Now they were in their mid-forties, Foxglove's hair still long and in a ponytail, Hazel's threaded with grey but short. She had a grey around her temples that gave her butch appearance something of the appearance of a dignified elder, their hands clasped. She saw Hazel chucking Foxglove under the chin as the other woman giggled in her demure femme sense, and then they paused as they saw the young girl who was neither, in truth, but only seemed to be feeding the birds, leaning forward slightly. 

"Isn't that?" Hazel heard Fox's question quietly, but simply nodded to her. For a moment the old envy Foxglove felt, the bitterness at a girl in a top hat who'd nearly seduced her love and who had done, in her view, rather more than that when the incident with Alvie as a boy instead of the young man in his early thirties he now was, had happened. But it faded when she took a closer look. The girl did not have the top hat today and there was a kind of strangeness to her motions, a nostalgic film in her eyes and a slight quivering of her lips. The envy faded then and there was a compassion instead that led to her following Hazel about a minute later. 

\-------

Death looked up. 

"Oh. Hi." She didn't want to look at Hazel, the memory of that deep set of emotions that coursed through her like a ship plowing through a storm on the high seas curdled and she did not have the time-space-patience to try to wrangle this along with everything else she dealt with. Instead she focused on tearing more bread and throwing it, at first. 

"Are you here for us?" The sense of fear in Hazel's voice was real and it curdled Death's jumbled emotions further. Even the people she loved feared her, she was used to it from her family but to have that reminder here cut more deeply on this day than she wanted to. 

She let herself look up, hating that there were tears that hovered at the edge of her eyes before closing them and shaking her head. 

"No," she rasped out. "I'm not." 

"Are you all right?" It was the other voice, Foxglove's, and that surprised her. It was not a voice ridden with the kind of envy and spite she'd heard when she quietly took time on her rounds to check up on them and on Alvie whenever they did mention her. It was softer, kinder, understanding. 

"No," was all she wanted to say, at first. She was in a more mortal form, so she sounded like Didi when she said it, but they knew it was not Didi. 

"What's wrong?" Again that voice, with its lilt, the way the kindness wormed into her when she did not wish to want to reciprocate it. 

"My brother died on this day twenty four years ago. I'm here to mourn for him." 

She did not see the two women looking at each other, though she did hear the surprised element in Hazel's voice that gave it a slight break in the words spoken: 

"You have a brother?" 

Death nodded. 

"More than one, but you met this one. Back in that day when Wanda died." 

They remembered then the image of a being like a man but not a man, tall and gangly with eyes that shone with the infinite stars of the Heavens. 

"That was your brother?" Foxglove hated how small her voice sounded, and the way she seemed to shrink but what could one do when one saw Death mourning for Dream? And realized that it truly was _Death_ and that the figure they'd seen was no less than the Lord Shaper himself, the most strange and wondrous of the seven Endless? 

Death nodded. 

"Yes. I took him twenty-four years ago. I tried to save his life the year before. Wanted him to see what family meant. All he saw was his job and his duties and he couldn't let himself be with his own family without dying and making a great big theatrical show of it." 

Death clicked her teeth. 

"We're intruding, aren't we?" Hazel's voice had an uneasy lilt to them, one that mirrored the way her fists clenched slightly, and then she slipped her hand back into Fox's. When Death said nothing they understood and they left, Fox resting her head on Hazel's shoulder. 

Death spent time, and she did not know how much time, letting the grief flow through her, remembering the times with Morpheus and even with the first Despair. So seldom did she let herself truly do these things, let herself be more of a person where her sphere and her function intruded. It felt good. Each bit of bread sent and each bit of cooing from the pigeons was a small bit of warmth in a long life weighed down by too many things and where her own pride in its own mirror of her brother did not let her speak, not then. 

\------

More time passed and she was lost in feeding the birds and the various emotions that were there with her, the loaf half-gone, when a figure began to stride in to her right. He was tall and gangly, clothing white as the bone-hue of his skin and his hair likewise, his eyes still the infinite starlight of Night. He stood there for a moment, watching his sister. For a moment he too remembered a day when he had been lost, his purpose gone, and all that was left was to go through motions he did not understand. Sorrow crossed his face for a moment, mirroring what he had seen in her face when Despair had called him and told him that his sister was there in her realm again, marking so many of her mirrors that she did not know what to do. So often had she seen this and spent time tearing at herself with hooks, as given their estrangement it was no simple thing for her to reach out. 

Here, seeing Death lost to her realm ever more completely, she had decided to take action for a change. 

He watched her and he saw the tears streaking her face before he strode over to the bench and sat down at her right. 

**What are you doing?**

She couldn't meet his eyes either. 

Feeding the pigeons. 

Dream leaned forward toward her with a roguish smile on his face. 

**You do that too much, you know what you get?**

Death looked at him, wiping her tears with one hand and raising an eyebrow. 

She couldn't resist a slight smile as she said: 

_**Fat pigeons?** _

Dream laughed, for a moment, and her eyes widened slightly. He did laugh in her presence in the old days but it was more infrequent. 

**I know I haven't been to see or to speak to you as much, since I....changed. And I am sorry about that, sister.**

She looked at him. 

_**I could come to see you more, too.** _

That look and the way her voice quavered meant that her mask slipped (not that she understood how much Despair, for all that her second form was always estranged from her, knew of her and yet said nothing, trusting her sister with her own life). Dream saw behind it and something of the hidden things his sister struggled with, and the degrees to which her own pride in refusing to deal with them mirrored his own. 

She handed Dream some of the loaf and he took it, and they spent the rest of the day together, as she scooted closer to him and found herself willing to let the sorrows and the rest lift. For today, there were pigeons and there was her brother and the Sun that slowly crossed over the sky. 

She yawned afterward, for at work it had been a long and a busy day, Darkseid in particular particularly active and sacking a planet three galaxies away. Several trillion lives taken all at once, and even her own being struggled with such a weight. It gave her steps a kind of tiredness to them that meant she would have tripped and fallen on the concrete had it not been for her brother reaching down to grasp her and to put her arm around his shoulder. 

**You're tired. Long day?**

She nodded, or more precisely dipped her chin, and walked with him as he took his time and patiently took her on the same road that Destruction had taken, from the park into the skies, reality seeming to follow them as if panels on a page, until they arrived at his palace, where he picked up his sister and placed her on a couch in his palace. 

He knelt down beside her, kissing her forehead. 

**Rest, sister. You take on yourself too much. You are no more alone than the rest of us, even if you try to be.**

He formed a blanket with a slight motion of his wrist, lowering it around her and Death hummed quietly, as Dream returned to his throne and spent the night watching as the half of the world in darkness saw its dreamers' experiences, each shaping their parts of the Dreaming as they wished. 

When that half was on the dawn-side he saw Death, now awake and feeling for a change more refreshed than she usually allowed herself to feel. She walked toward him in her jeans, her top tucked within her shoes and her belt having the skull-adornments that day, along with two skull barrettes on either side of her head. She leaned forward on one leg and kissed Dream on the cheek. 

_**Thank you Dream, I'll be seeing you.** _

As she vanished with a sound of beating wings, Dream smiled on his throne, and said nothing. 


End file.
